So can I "cast" content managed in this system? Does it integrate with Jellyfin? Or is this STRICTLY about managing the files + metadata and you're still expected to use it alongside Plex/Jellyfish's own metadata management?

I found it surprisingly hard to answer this question poking around at the website and links shared in this thread.

If "alongside Plex, Jellyfin" would be an intended use-case then I would've involved those names in the README or website.

Of course you can run Media Hoarder alongside them, it won't interfere, but that'd be about it.

I had similar questions after seeing the release info and doing a quick scan.

I came to the HN Comments here and the first thing I see is someone asking exactly what I was wondering, followed by this:

> If "alongside Plex, Jellyfin" would be an intended use-case then I would've involved those names in the README or website.

I appreciate that this is an open source project you've likely put hundreds or thousands of hours of work into. You're under no obligation to be 'nice' or polite to people.

But the perceived tone of this reply doesn't leave a positive impression.

I see others have also left similarly... negative? sarcastic? replies to other questions about it.

While it may be obvious to you, and other dedicated users - seeing that it's a "frontend" to a media collection doesn't really clarify it.

I still have no freaking idea if I can play media through it or with it and at this point, I really don't care.

Information that you can and it doesn't interfere would be useful information.

Having an alternative to Tautili and/or getting more information on my media sounds nice. But I have the media so I can watch it, and if it interferes with that then I am not personally interested.

From a former obsessive media hoarder of over a decade, to my fellow media hoarders, my sincere advice: give up. Just stop. Delete it all and embrace streaming or ad hoc torrent if you need it. All of this hoarding is just not worth your time.

I would add, stop setting up these huge RAID 6/10 boxes to store all your hoarded media. Media doesn't need additional redundancy, especially not if it's based on good old "naval aquisition".

If it came from the internet, chances are high that it can still be found there, and there's absolutely no reason for you to add any redundancy to avoid data loss. If it's by some weird coincidence not found on the internet, fear not, most media is mass replicated onto various forms of physical media, and chances are high that a copy of that can be had for very little money.

But before rushing out to empty the local "on sale" DVD/Blu-Ray bins, take a good long breath and consider if you'll ever actually watch said media again, or it's just sentimental value ? Most of the people i know that hoard media will rarely rewatch anything, and simply pile on top of what they already have. Once you realize that you're just collecting digital cruft, it becomes a lot easier to just delete it all.

Also keep in mind that the electricity cost of running a harddrive in europe is around €2/month, and with enough harddrives it actually becomes cheaper to just subscribe to one or more streaming services.

Problem is to watch all the things you want to watch you may need 5 or 6 subs, so you could add a few more hard drives I'd say.

just switch between 2-3 subs, rotate them every 1-3 months.

What a pain when popcorn time makes it so much easier and puts everything in one place.

a decade? no offense, especially if you're a millennial - ten years isn't that long. I have hundreds of compact disks approaching three times that old. "ad hoc torrent" sounds great, but you're at the whims of seeds, and cease and desist letters. This also doesn't take into account monthly bandwidth "caps".

There's somethings i have for background noise and visuals that i got on YT - what, i should stream it every time? even at 480p this will eat into monthly caps. What about things where i know i have one of the only full (as in needs no fills) copies of some media from the 1990s? Less than 5% of the stuff i keep is contemporaneous with the download date.

If one is just downloading "current" things and then figuring out how to store more of it; then i 100% agree. That's a waste of space and time. Chances are you're paying for the right to stream it, and if you don't care about caps, burn the shareholder money for all i care by streaming it whenever you want to see it. Ideally at 4k.

I'll keep downloading and storing stuff i find important - someday when/if youtube deletes some channels i have backed up, or a production company pulls all their content off of streaming platforms, or a different archive with convoluted steps to access content ceases to exist - i'll still have it, with subtitle files, searchable, locally. It happens a lot more often than you think.

You sound less like a "media hoarder" and more like an Archivist.

that's the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me.

I'm not an avid youtube watcher, but there was a specific user-made video to a rare version of a song that I used to keep coming back to. It's not on Youtube any more. That version of the song isn't even on youtube any more.

I'm fairly lazy / procrastinatey when it comes to things like that, but thank f*ck I yt-dlp'd it (and really not too long before it was taken down - and I don't know why and can't track down why or who made the clip).

Maybe I need to do a search to see if other people are looking for it...

And if anyone cares to know: The Mountains of Madness CD1 (I think) version Idalah Abal by John Zorn / Electric Masada, and the film clip was a bunch of still of various, mostly fringe, some quite gross/confronting art pieces. For me, it fits beautifully with the phrenetic music.

I think there's a big, thick, mental health-related line that separates an archivist from a hoarder.

Edit: OK, there are more versions the song on yt, eg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swpvDV6Qvik, but that custom film-clip ain't.

Edit 2: Wrong on both counts, my search-fu ain't what it used to be. It's still there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9jk6lolne8

There was a good couple of years it didn't float to the surface of any unchanged search query.

Cool story bro, pity it makes your argument eat itself... sigh.

one of the reasons i try and remember to download playlists or all videos from a channel in at least 480p dates back when a zen landscaper/lawn maint/mower guy's videos got wiped because people doxxed his clients. He was, to us, the audio-visual equivalent of an anti-anxiety medication. He had a "dingo" style mower, where you stand on an articulating platform; behind something that looks like the things they use to wax/clean floors in markets with tile floors.

I hadn't seen many (if any) videos, prior to his, where someone would go "clean up" around either abandoned or neglected properties (like a rental off season or something) - weed-eating the sidewalks and shoveling. It's more common now, i see several different creators doing similar videos now; and things like powerwashing driveways, the carpet ones (those are pretty zen if you like gross, unidentifiable liquids), and a few others.

The closest thing i've found to his stuff is Andrew Camarata (@ on YT), but their videos are much louder in general.

anyhow, all this to say - it spurred me into action. I started using "home server" stuff shortly after.

You just made me play the first MP3 I ever downloaded, Tubthumping by Chumbawamba. Downloaded over 56k modem in the 90's.

The timestamp on it is 2006, I guess I edited the ID3 tags on it at that point.

It's not worth it obsessively, but casually or with-specific-purpose I believe it is worth the time and effort. It uses 'muscles' that I occasionally need, and would rather not let atrophy - primarily related to the enshittification of all things.

In specific scenarios local copies are far more valuable than 'cloud' availability.

Having said that, maybe we're quibbling over the definition of 'hoarding', which maybe (hah! definitely!) implies obsessive, and therefore implicitly unhealthy - in which case I agree.

Nah.

You do you though.

It doesn't take much to "hoard". Especially these days it's easier and cheaper than ever. Slap 2x20TB drives in your PC and you're essentially a data hoarder already.

I do notice that younger generations absolutely love giving up though.

Obsession is a problem in any activity.

Would it be possible to import titles as a text list, instead of requiring files?

I'm not a hoarder, but I do have a (very) long Excel file of movies and documentaries that I want to watch or have already watched. Most of them are available on streaming sites or for rent/download on demand.

You've got a great IMDb scraper and filtering UI. That's all I really need! :)

Still based on files, however, Media Hoarder doesn't care if you feed it 0-byte files. So yes, you can export your Excel file as such.

Actually, I do use 0-byte files in my tests and demos. They are artificially created in the following way: https://github.com/theMK2k/media-hoarder-testset-generator

Sounds like you can generate a folder of files from an input excel using FUSE.

This looks cool but I was thrown by how the heatmaps were organized; having seasons as rows and episodes as columns would be more natural to me.

Feel free to open up an issue on GitHub, maybe we introduce an option on how heatmaps are shown :)

It is so strange to me when people get downvoted for suggesting a possible solution is to volunteer some effort. HN is all about open source until someone mentions creating a PR or even just a simple issue. Is this forum the definitive spot for complaining about software?

Filing an issue on GitHub is the correct thing to do. It has higher visibility for a longer period of time than a hacker news comment and is more likely to resolve the issue while wasting less time of the maintainer's and anyone else using the software.

edit: It seems you've been upvoted back to normal. Ignore me.

isn't "show hn" also meant to get some feedback? responding to feedback with a counterrequest seems off

If it were a product or merely a project, you would be correct. But, open source software has too many users who think they are owed free features as it is. What's more, there's a high possibility that people on this particular forum actually have the skills to implement a proper PR. Finally, their comment clearly wasn't meant as a dismissive counter request but rather as an invitation for mutual excitement, and even an admission that the criticism was correct, but would be better served on the Github repository.

Agree that rows/columns following normal latin writing feeling more "natural" to me, but a bigger roadblock is that the chosen colors are completely identical for people with the most common type of colorblindness. :(

At least I can tilt my screen until the colors get wonky and see the pattern! For a while I admit I didn't even notice there was color coding at all.

I might introduce an option for self-defining the color scheme. Care to head over to GitHub and create an issue on it and volunteer for testing?

I just _refreshed_ my setup replacing my shield and trying to get Emby and Kodi working together…

This looks great especially since I have complete collections of various sci if stuff I loved growing up (Star Trek: TNG, Star Gate). The big thing for me is how this supports sitting on the couch and looking for something to watch.

I've been using Jellyfin on Windows server (Arc GPU) for server, Shield for client, it's been working pretty well. What hardware are you using?

I am thinking about picking up a shield as a client in a similar setup. If you're using subtitles -- does the shield handle them well? That's the part that keeps breaking in the native TV client.

I use Kodi with the jellyfin plugins on my shield and it works well. Subtitle support is pretty good but occasionally I need to restart the app to get new subs to display for a show.

The native jellyfin client is ok for simple things but it's far more limited than Kodi.

The subtitles I use are most often ones in separate files alongside the video files, named appropriately for the jellyfin server to see it. I think embedded subs work well too, sometimes needing burning in, but my server can handle transcoding.

There are some quirks with using Jellyfin+Kodi with external subs. It used to be solved by the "direct play" feature in Jellyfin4Kodi where it would just pass Kodi a link to the SMB/NFS shares, but the newest releases of Jellyfin have deprecated and hidden the server side feature that enabled that. I had a talk with the devs about it on GitHub and they don't really know if/when it's gonna come back.

The Shield uses the same Jellyfin client as any AndroidTV/GoogleTV box. You can use Kodi on the Shield if you want native support for more subtitle formats, but that's also true of other AndroidTV/GoogleTV devices.

I think this may be one of the wares I looked at when I was hoping to build a catalog of at least my visual media. Something in the sense of "I have this on a DVD, I have that on Blu-Ray" or "I have this as an .mp4." However, this was complicated by looking for something open-source enough that I could stick my fingers in the database and go from there to bring the catalog, or something like it, to a webpage.

Has anyone rolled this into a docker container yet?

Would you like me to share if I can't find one and wind up doing it myself?

Thanks so much for posting this. Instant bookmark.

Do you plan on writing comparisons with other tools like Jellyfin and Kyoo?

You're welcome :)

I didn't plan to do direct comparisons, but it's not the first time someone asked about this, I might have to do it...

I'm more of a streamer and used to things like JustWatch and like it a lot. But your solution provides such an intuitive, comprehensive and complete UX at a really amazing speed. Like IMDB and JustWatch combined on steroids. Kudos!

Going up against the *arrs is no small feat. What sets you apart?

First of all, I don't use any arr. From what I see the arr tools are used for obtaining media, less so presenting and providing a UI. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I assume that *arr tools and Media Hoarder might actually go well together.

It would be interesting to integrate it with Trakt data so I can sync the watched / watchlist from my Trakt library and find new movies and series to watch.

My personal thoughts;

When there are quite a few well-established media storage/player solutions/toolings, you should look into starting your marketing page with why you are different or better than the others. Most reasons for people moving between tools is the lack of the features in the ones that users are using and hoping it is in the new one.

Of course, if you can get a lot of testimonials then that should work better.

I can't wait until he's so successful that he abandons all of his original users/customers, and tries to become some sort of third tier streaming solution that can only license movies that used to be completely unknown outside of Walmart "2 DVDs for $5" bargain bins.

this made me chuckle, yes, it's not gonna happen :D

You're right and I am and was hesitant to put Media Hoarder directly against established solutions on the front page.

I created a blog post about this when v1.0.0 was released (maybe a bit too hidden): https://media.hoarder.software/blog/why-media-hoarder

Can it save metadata in nfo files so that kodi can read them? Kodi scraper is really inaccurate imo.

Yes, someone (you?) can create a "Kodi .nfo" exporter from the SQLite database.

Interesting license choice. Where'd you find it/what motivated you to choose it?

Thanks for bringing this up. I hadn't noticed it.

> The software may not be used by anyone for systems or activities that actively and knowingly endanger, harm, or otherwise threaten the physical, mental, economic, or general well-being of other individuals or groups

I'm not sure how the United Nations defines economic harm, but if anybody's using this to view pirated content, it seems like they might not have a license to it (and using it would be a separate copyright violation).

But I suppose if you're pirating your media anyway, violating the media center's copyright wouldn't really be a concern.

My pacifist nature lead the choice and I probably saw that license on some other random projects iirc.

So, like, this is for pirated movies and TV shows, right? This and all the alternatives mentioned in the comments too?

Or are people really ripping DVDs and Blu-Rays from huge personal collections?

The library is a pirate's best friend

> So, like, this is for pirated movies and TV shows, right?

Can be used, probably yeah. Doesn't mean that's the primary purpose. I know plenty of people who buy DVDs and rip them as it's easier to play it back than letting kids fiddle around with DVD players and disks.

Can confirm I know some folks who rip their DVD/BluRay collection to stream in the home.

There's other use cases as well:

- DVR'd recordings

- Public domain videos

- Archived web content

- Home videos / Phone videos

I actually use JellyFin for all of these use cases, and also rip my movie collection using Handbrake. Do most people use it for pirated content? Probably.

I love pricing page.

This really needs some explanation, in text, of what it's actually doing and what media means here.

Thanks, I wasn't aware that it might leave room for interpretation or confusion.

Literally the first sentence is "Media Hoarder is THE frontend for your Movie and TV Series collection if you love metadata, filter abilities and easy management." and secondly there is a huge screenshot below that with everything you need to understand.

Not sure how it can be made any more clear than what it is?

This is not really explaining the purpose. Does it scan video-Files to collect entries? Or is it manual input? Can I import data from somewhere? Does it play files? Does it integrate into netflix&co. to gather new entries? And let's not talk about more special features..

Why is it called media, when it seems to only handle movies & series? There are many more types and categories of media. And why is the feature-list on Github just a long list of filters, while it at the same time sells itself as "THE frontend" for whatever it's doing. The small bit of data managment and filters I see on github is on the level of an excel-sheet, which very far from what I would call "THE frontend".

So my question is, what is missing here?

> This is not really explaining the purpose. Does it scan video-Files to collect entries? Or is it manual input? Can I import data from somewhere? Does it play files? Does it integrate into netflix&co. to gather new entries? And let's not talk about more special features..

Those are all either answered in the README, answered in files linked from the README or not mentioned in the README/docs (like Netflix integration, playing files) so one can feel safe to assume it's not a feature if it's not listed as a feature.

>Those are all either answered in the README, answered in files linked from the README or not mentioned in the README/docs (like Netflix integration, playing files) so one can feel safe to assume it's not a feature if it's not listed as a feature.

Translation for those who can't read between the lines:

- it doesn't support media scanning

- the authors are going hard on not saying this outright. Figure the idea is more downloads from people aspiring to scan their media (who got duped), but then "fall in love" with the program when they see how great it is albeit unable to do what they wanted, scan media. 0/10 this is catfishing, be honest and listen to what the users want, a solution for media scanning. A meta-data organizer is useless without metadata! Which is what the scanner produces!

Not sure what you mean by "media scanning", but if you assume that Media Hoarder isn't able to scan directories of your media, then I need to update the README - because it absolutely DOES this.

[Edit]: I read your post a second time, you use the term "media scanning" for two different things:

1/ Scanning in files

2/ Providing Metadata

Both are supported by Media Hoarder, none of the metadata you see in the screenshots and demos are manually provided by the user.

If you want to dig a bit deeper (coming from the README), you can see linked documents that go into detail for both topics:

https://github.com/theMK2k/Media-Hoarder?tab=readme-ov-file#...

> playing files

Thanks for pointing this out. Of course, Media Hoarder "plays files" - by launching the media player of your choice. I quickly updated the README :|